California's leadership in saturated fads

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, January 20, 1999

NORMALLY, I dread parties even more than I do a root canal - a throng of strangers swilling merlot and making small talk amidst a steady whine of toddlers demanding attention.

But a few weeks ago, the day after the impeachment of the president, I was eager to drive up to Brian and Heidi's party in Marin County. The lynching of Slick Willie was - had to be - the sort of epochal event that might shake California's yuppies out of their pathological solipsism and force them to share viewpoints on topics other than herbalism, infant-rearing, resume one-upmanship and comparative real estate.

I was spoiling for a little hardball - ex-hippies vs. rock-ribbed Reaganites.

President Trump addresses nation after mass shooting at Florida SchoolWhite House

My fantasy, alas, withered the moment I ventured into the kitchen and found three heterosexual adult males discussing, in hushed and heated tones, a neighbor's appalling errors in bathroom decor. I fled toward a group of women speaking cordially, but barely able to contain their outrage, about the wedge issue currently turning the American people into warring camps: cloth diapers versus disposables.

As I felt my mind drifting away from the constitutional crises in D.C., I was reminded that California operates, always, at America's psychic vanguard. While the alarmist media have fretted about Americans' electoral apathy, Marin County has already achieved a higher, apolitical consciousness.

Affluent Californians do not reject the nation's political, social, intellectual and civic realities. They do not ignore such matters. They simply, intuitively, pretend that such worlds, and their travails, do not exist - and never did. Middle Earth? Yes. Middle America? No way, man.

In the idyllic realm of California into which I sometimes stumble, Rydell High, of "Grease" fame, lives forever. The quaint duties of discourse, engagement and solution are irrelevant among the practitioners of an idiom so self-allusive, jejune and picayune that it rarely extends beyond the range of one person and that person's conversational victim.

Irresistibly, first two, then three, then 10 people, a neighborhood, a state, a nation - drugged by denatured overdoses of double decaf latte with lowfat milk - sink into a spiral of insipid gibbering so hypnotic that no event short of nuclear war can break its spell.

It's a lovely thing when you see it happening. Public affairs - with their gloomy potential for afflicting the unwary with confusion, doubt, angst, even fear - fade in significance among a populace inundated by fads, diversions, megavitamins, gimmicks, pagers, feature stories and mental chewing gum.

California is the laboratory. Barely a day goes by without the birth of a popular phenomenon whose greatest charm is its power to entirely obscure the existence of a community beyond the borders of personal space (or the starship Enterprise): UFOlogy, New Wave mysticism, communication-by-tattoo, the bicycle / Spandex cult, the anti-oxidant cult, the recovered-memory cult, sun-dried tomatoes, smoke-free bars, pet ferrets, vegans,

"Baywatch," chardonnay, soccer, etc.

Ideas anointed in California are interesting not because they are controversial, debatable or disturbing. They are interesting because they are, well, soft, and not interesting. Political correctness has matured kindly and gently, into a sea of pabulum.

Baby-talk rules - dude.

As a curmudgeon from the voluble Midwest, I am prone to deplore the monastic serenity of the California utopia. But I am resigned to my extinction. I represent a Luddite atavism falling out of favor.

With every significant movement from Free Speech to immigrant-bashing, California is America's bellwether. As Mill Valley goes, so go Peoria and Perth Amboy. California will be the first to forget.

Forget impeachment. Forget the presidency. Forget the Constitution and the rich entertainment of partisan rancor. We are evolving from disgust to disengagement at warp speed. If you don't have a neurosis to confess or a diet restriction to enforce, you might as well stay home alone with C-SPAN and your own damn chardonnay.

Examiner contributor David Benjamin, who moved to California after many years in Japan, is finishing a book about Paris.&lt;